In a Book Club Far Away

by Tif Marcelo

  “About what?”

  “I don’t know. For wanting to leave the Army?”

  “No, not at all. We’re serving now, Castro. Here’s my thought on the matter: it’s better to run to something than run from something. So I say, have a plan, and if that plan sounds better than what you’re doing now, then go for it.” Cyn spared Regina a glance as they turned the corner. “You know that you can’t own and operate a food business while on active duty, right?”

  “Shhhhh. I said that when I was drunk.” She looked around for prying ears, and remembered she’d revealed the same thing to Adelaide and Sophie the first night they met.

  “Why is it a secret?”

  “Because that’s not what I went to college for!” A wave of emotion rose in her chest. She didn’t graduate from a great college and then join the Army so she could eventually grill burgers whenever her husband burned dinner. Nor would she give up the security of being able to support herself to chase a pipe dream of being a chef. Not only would she have to go back to school (um, no), but her projected income would be pennies for a long time as she established herself.

  She had always been a responsible person. She had great credit, and she helped out by sending cash to her brothers, who were still in college.

  At the thought of burgers, her tummy growled, and she laid a palm against it. “Ugh.”

  “Oh God, you don’t sound so good.”

  “I did stop by my friend Sophie’s place the other day. She had a houseful of kids. We were making Christmas cookies to send downrange. Maybe I got sick from them?”

  At the mention of cookies, she detected a butter aftertaste in the back of her throat, and her nose conjured up the smell of cookie dough. A quiet burp escaped her, which gave her a moment’s relief, but what followed was a bubble of disgusting, sickening air. Cyn was still chatting away as the bubble rose up higher and higher, until Regina felt it in her nose.

  Regina halted a quarter mile away from the run’s end point, and in between the winter-hardy holly bushes that lined the trail of the running path, she bent over at the waist, both hands resting on her knees as she heaved, though nothing came out. Tears leaked from her eyes at the effort, and her chest burned, body lurching in between the gasps.

  “Oh my God. Are you okay?” Cyn ran toward her.

  Regina shook her head, eyes wet. Then, another bubble rose from the pit of her stomach, and this time, she gave into it. Sure enough, last night’s dinner, along with half her intestines, came up and out.

  The effort put her in a daze, so much that she didn’t know how she made it back to her car and then home. But with Cyn to help her, she somehow climbed up to the third-floor apartment without upchucking in the stairwell. She hobbled into the apartment, beelining straight to the bathroom, passing by her bedroom, where she caught sight of her hanging calendar over her desk.

  She knelt in front of the toilet. Cyn rubbed her back as she emptied her tummy again.

  It had been years since Regina had hugged the porcelain goddess, and even then, she could count on one hand how many times she’d drunk enough to feel sick. Throughout the years that were supposed to be the wildest in her life, she’d kept the fine balance of working hard and playing hard. There was too much pressure on her to succeed. Excuses were not tolerated in the Castro family, especially from her, the eldest and a girl.

  Her heart dropped.

  She was a girl. A girl who could become a mother.

  “No, no, no, no, no.” She shook her head. Thoughts on the calendar she’d seen a moment ago, her mind counted down the days since Logan left. About eight weeks. Had she had a period in between?

  “What is it?” Cynthia said, coming from the kitchen, a glass of water in her hand.

  Reality crashed down. “Oh God.”

  Regina and Logan had decided to wait to get pregnant. If she was indeed pregnant, Logan would miss the entire pregnancy. They would somehow have to work together, harder—they couldn’t be dysfunctional. They could not continue on the same contentious road they had traveled the last two years.

  Regina shut her eyes and leaned back against the porcelain tub. Breathed in deeply, exhaled slowly. She imagined herself physically pushing the nausea back down her esophagus.

  She had to calm down. She had to think.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Sophie

  “I don’t think this is a good idea, Mommy,” Olivia warned Sophie from the back seat of her SUV.

  “Mommy, they’re fighting!” added Carmela, who was looking out her window.

  In front of them was a blooming confrontation. At the parking lot of the post office, next to the only grocery store open in town, the night before Thanksgiving, Sophie watched as a woman exited her vehicle to yell at a man who’d crashed his shopping cart into her front fender.

  ’Tis the holiday season.

  “We’ll walk the other way. Mommy has an important thing to drop off at the post office that can’t wait.”

  “Is this for your new school?”

  “Maybe, sweetie, maybe.” Sophie swallowed her giddiness.

  The last couple of months had been tough. Harder than it had been in the past, perhaps because now, her schedule oscillated between stark loneliness when the girls were at school to chaos when the girls arrived home each day. Sophie, proud of her profession, of managing a challenging work schedule, had found herself with little to do that was for herself. Since the deployment, she’d decluttered everything in her home twice over, caught up on all the shows she’d been recording on the DVR, and even meal planned through December.

  Then, the other week, Sophie’d read an article about being able to earn a master’s degree online. She’d undertaken a deep dive into the different schools and what kind of degree she could get, the requirements and cost, and if she’d needed to take the GRE. She discovered that with some nursing master’s programs, it wasn’t necessary, though she would need to coordinate her clinical rotations with a local hospital.

  It was doable. At the very least, something to look forward to. The prospect of work, even if it was school, settled her anxiety about the future; just doing something about the situation made her feel better.

  But the application process was frustrating. Her computer was slow; it was fussy. The internet kept cutting out with the snow. So she completed the forms the old-school way: she’d downloaded them and filled them out by hand. With the deadline at the end of November, it had to go into the mail that day.

  “Ready, girls?”

  “No,” Carmela said intently. “It’s cold.”

  “I’m tired,” Olivia added.

  “How about this?” She caught her daughters’ eyes in the rearview mirror. “After the post office, we can swing by the grocery store for a little treat. Maybe doughnuts?”

  As she’d expected, their eyes lit up. They both jumped out of the minivan with glee, and after a short wait at the post office, skipped alongside Sophie to the grocery store, where she filled up a small box with a half dozen doughnuts.

  On the way to the register, Sophie remembered that she needed tampons, so she and the girls detoured to the feminine hygiene aisle, where only one person lingered. The woman’s high ponytail was distinct. The way she stood was striking and familiar, with one hand on her hip, the other holding a box, as if she were in an argument with it.

  “Reggie?”

  Regina jumped. “Oh my God, you scared me!”

  “You mean like Babcock?”

  Sophie was met with a blank expression.

  Sophie eyed the woman. “Really? It’s from The Passage, the book that we’re supposed to have read by tomorrow. Babcock was one of those vampire-ish monsters who…”

  Recognition flashed. “Oh, yeah… right. I only got a little more than halfway.”

  “That’s more than four hundred pages, so I commend you,” Sophie said slowly, catching sight of what was in Regina’s hand.

  A pregnancy test.

  Regina’s lips began to trem
ble ever so imperceptibly. “There are so many choices, you know? Three-minute tests, one minute, plus sign indicators or without? Generic or brand name?” She gestured to the shelves below them, to the condoms and contraceptives and lube. “It’s ironic that they stock these together.”

  “Reggie, do you think you’re pregnant?” Sophie eyed her girls; they’d wandered across the aisle to the baby toys, where they squeezed stuffed animals hanging on hooks. Normally she wouldn’t allow them to play in the store, but her priority at the moment was Regina.

  “Y-yes.” Her hands wandered to the right of the tests, to the ovulation strips. “When didn’t my birth control work? When was it all decided that I would be part of the point-three percent of birth control failures?” She covered her mouth. “Oh God, I’m going to be like my parents, who didn’t plan for me. Am I even ready? Is Logan?”

  Sophie wrapped her arms around Regina. Hugging was not something she did for everyone, but right then, Regina had triggered the mother, not the nurse, in Sophie.

  “You’re not your mother. Logan is not your father.”

  “What if I suck at even doing this? At hugging?” Regina said, through tears. “I’ve never been really touchy-feely; I don’t know how to talk to kids. I mean, do your twins even like me?”

  “What?” Sophie half laughed and pulled back. “No, you’re not going to suck at hugging, or at talking to kids. I promise you. And watch this.” She looked over her shoulder. “Girls, do you know this lady?”

  Olivia frowned. “Yeah. That’s Ms. Regina. Duh!”

  “And do you like Ms. Regina?”

  Both girls grinned widely. “Yes!” Carmela said. “She gives us candy.”

  “See?” Sophie said, then took her voice down. “Now tell me. Why do you think you’re pregnant?”

  “I’m late, and I was sick today.”

  “The only definitive way to find out is if you get a blood test. But in terms of over-the-counter tests, any one of these will do.” She touched the row of boxes, read their specs, settled for the eeny-meeny-miny-mo method, and plucked the winner. She carefully worded her next question. “Would this be good news or…”

  “I think so?” Regina’s face was blank. “I’m not sure. Logan and I are… complicated. I thought we would have more time.… Look at me making excuses.”

  “It’s okay.” Sophie put a hand on her arm and took her phone out of her pocket. She flipped it open and dialed, and the sound of the buttons echoed through the silent store.

  “Who are you call—”

  Adelaide answered after the first ring. “Speak now or forever hold your peace!”

  She was always so extra. “Hey, Ad. SOS. Meet me and Reggie at my house in about a half hour?”

  “I’m there! Wait, I lie. I have a pie in the oven. Cripes.”

  “Really, you don’t have to—” Regina tugged Sophie’s arm.

  Sophie gently pushed Regina away. “Ad, how about we come to you?”

  “Sounds good. Shall I open a bottle of rosé?”

  “Uh…” Sophie looked at Regina. “Maybe? But we’ll grab more sustenance.”

  When she hung up, she linked her arm around Regina’s. “You can’t do this on your own. This is an SOS situation.”

  “But…”

  “No buts. Let us take care of you. Grab some snacks, like Twinkies and Bugles or something. And maybe your favorite soda.”

  Sophie trailed after Regina as she grabbed exactly the things she loved the most: Fanta. And vanilla ice cream. Little Debbie pies and Funyuns. They upgraded from a basket to a cart, which hadn’t looked so sinful since high school.

  That night, she and Adelaide and Regina snacked and watched Regina’s favorite movie, Titanic, which Adelaide happened to have on DVD, and after getting Sophie’s kids to bed in Adelaide’s extra bedroom, they stayed up past midnight to watch Adelaide’s favorite thing: infomercials.

  At two in the morning, when Regina finally summoned the courage, she tore the pregnancy test’s wrapper and walked into the bathroom. Sophie sat, her back against the closed door, with Adelaide. Three minutes later, the door behind them opened, and Sophie looked up to Regina, holding up a test stick with a positive sign in the little window.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Adelaide

  Thanksgiving Day, 2011

  Adelaide took a sip of her beer and suffered through the brain freeze, willing the numbness to spread throughout her body. She was huddled around Frank Montreal’s coffee table for November’s book club, with a portable heater set up behind her. And yet, she felt cold all over, stiff and unfeeling.

  Regina was pregnant. Pregnant, and not even on purpose.

  The next second she was hit with a wall of guilt—she should’ve been happy for her friend. A million things had to go right to ovulate, to inseminate, to survive. Apparently, it just happened for lots of people, including Sophie, now Regina, and pretty much everyone who came to book club, but not her.

  “Thank you everyone for making this a potluck. Otherwise, we’d all just be eating chicken wings and Doritos chips.” Frank entered their circle, carrying a hefty hardback in his hand. “Are you ready to talk The Passage? I personally think that it’s all perfectly timed. The people in the book are doing everything that we’re simply trying to do during deployment and the holidays: survive.”

  A round of hell yeses and nods and um-hmms responded back. Adelaide took another swig of beer, because she might as well. Neither being healthy, nor responsible, nor eating only organic, nor sleeping for eight hours had yielded her a baby, so what was the point? She couldn’t seem to get pregnant, and when she was pregnant, she couldn’t bring a baby to term.

  And yet Regina, who wasn’t planning to have a baby, got pregnant while on birth control.

  Adelaide had been doing fine. After her miscarriage earlier in the deployment, she’d visited her doctor twice to follow up. She’d chosen to keep the incident to herself—only Matt and her mother knew, and telling them was traumatic as it was. As the days passed, the cloud lifted just a little.

  That is, until last night, when Regina appeared from the bathroom holding up a positive pregnancy test. Adelaide’s emotions had swept her up like a tornado.

  There was a crash in the bedroom area, taking Adelaide out of her thoughts. It was followed by the chorus of children saying, “We’re okay!”

  Now that their spouses were gone, it was an unspoken rule that sometimes book club would include babies and children, and that meant interruptions. As the parents around her laughed, Adelaide joined in, because that’s what she did. Smile, dear. No one likes a grumpy goose, was what her mama always said. Patricia Wilson, despite her shy nature, was 100 percent hospitable and gracious 100 percent of the time, never once succumbing to TMI.

  “You picked a winner, Frank,” Adelaide said now, pulling the book from her tote bag and willing the meeting forward. “It was meaty but fun, and exactly what I needed to get away from the real world.”

  “And thanks for giving us till the end of the month to read this,” said Wendy Proctor, a first-timer. She was a teacher at the elementary school. “Everything was due from the kids the last couple of weeks, and I needed the extra time—especially for a book that’s eight hundred pages.”

  “I needed that week, too, to get myself together,” Frank said. “The deployment hit me hard this time. The kids are so confused. The last time Mel deployed, the kids were toddlers and now—well, sometimes they’re angry that she’s not around.”

  Frank did have a dark hue under his eyes, and his hair, usually cut short, was shaggy around the ears. Admittedly, Adelaide didn’t think of the guys having a hard time transitioning. And since the unit had deployed, she hadn’t checked in with Frank.

  She vowed to do better.

  “And are you? Getting yourself together?” Sophie asked, joining the circle, with a plate of dessert in her hand.

  “No. Not even.” Frank gestured at his outfit. “I’m really not sure if this shirt made it
to the laundry this week. Tuesday, I lost my car keys. Then I thought I would call Mel so I could pick up our spare from her at the office, and then I realized—nope. She’s not here.” Frank rolled his eyes. “I had to call a locksmith, and it was a total scam. Anyway”—he drew out the word, and pressed his palms against his cheeks—“I’ll stop now. We’re all in the same boat.”

  “But it doesn’t mean we can’t feel what we need to feel,” Sophie said, reaching across and squeezing his hand.

  “Oh my God, she does give fucks,” Colleen said, now settling into an empty seat, a plate in each hand. To the book clubbers who’d missed the escape room, whose glances bounced among the circle, she said, “See what happens when you miss book club?”

  “On that note”—Frank shook his head, laughing—“I have questions about the book.” He stood and passed a piece of paper to every book clubber, then stopped at an empty chair. “Regina!”

  “I’ll be there in a sec!”

  Adelaide turned to see Regina coming out of the bathroom. Her face seemed withdrawn, and Adelaide quickly looked away, pain striking her heart. She had probably just thrown up.

  Adelaide, too, had been sick during all of her short-lived pregnancies. Her longest pregnancy was thirteen weeks, but before she lost that baby, she felt the full pain of hyperemesis. She’d welcomed it, though. Welcomed the surge of hormones because that meant her baby had been growing. Until the baby no longer did.

  “Get your dessert and sit down before the children decide to become the Twelve,” Frank said.

  “Don’t even say that. That freaks me the hell out,” Kerry DeGuzman, one of the newbies said. “Have any of you ever startled awake in the middle of the night to see a child just looking at you?” She shivered.

  Most in the circle nodded. One started to commiserate about the strange sleeping habits of her child, and the whole conversation simply became too much for Adelaide. She stood abruptly, unintentionally interrupting. “Oh, excuse me. I forgot to grab dessert.”